Avengers Infinity War Board Game: Infinity Board by Evan and Nora

Our project is a Avengers board game, our objective was to make a fun and cool board game for many ages. We were inspired by the move Avengers: Infinity War because we both really like it One challenge we faced was that it was really hard to make good circles but we overcame that when we got a protractor. We learned that you won't have much time and you want to give yourselves as much time as possible. If we had more time we would make our own pieces and not just use legos for the pieces. When doing Maker Faire, you should choose a project that is not very hard and save the hard projects for masterworks our maker faire project costs about $65.72 because of all the legos, other than that it costs nothing. Our outside resource was Avengers: Infinity War here is a link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4154756/

Maker Faire 2019 Bath Bombs- Eva FG and Sofie

DIY Bath Bombs

For Maker Faire, we decided to create our own bath bombs. We first discovered the idea on the Maker Faire website. They looked really fun, and you can customize them any way you like. Also, they are pretty simple and don’t have complicated ingredients. We didn’t end up using that recipe, but it inspired us to look up other recipes online. We decided to make four bath bombs, and to make them orange scented. Though making bath bombs isn’t exactly solving a problem, they are really relaxing and fun to use. We initially wanted to try marbling, but didn’t have enough time. One challenge that we faced, was not having the right molds. Instead, we used two measuring cups stacked together, which made the bath bombs turn out a completely different shape than the regular molds. We eventually found the regular molds and made the rest of the bath bombs with those. They had plastic parts inside that shaped them into smiley faces, which added a special touch. If we had more time, we would try more recipes to perfect the bath bombs, and try a variety of different colors and techniques. If we did these again, we would use plastic wrap inside the molds so they would come out more easily, because we had trouble with that. Also, we would make sure that we stirred fast enough in the beginning so it doesn’t lose it's fizz. Buying all the ingredients (including molds) would cost around $40, but it would make many batches of bath bombs. This was a really fun project and know we know how to make these for ourselves at home.

Homemade organic mason jar ice cream

          6B- Ice Cream in a Mason Jar 

          By Sadie Burroughs and Amaya Heard

At the beginning of this project, we knew we wanted to make a sweet. Ice cream sounded like a fun, easy dessert that we both wanted to try making. We both knew that the summer was coming which inspired us to make something cold and sweet, like ice cream. At first, we wanted to make an ice cream machine out of cardboard, which would be our main focus. Ms. Hill said that it would be better to focus on the ice cream rather than the machine, so we decided to just make the ice cream instead. We also decided to make the ice cream in mason jars as a substitute for plastic bags. Replacing plastic bags with mason jars helps reduce plastic usage. We were going to make one ice cream vegan, and the other normal. We wanted to make the vegan ice cream so we were not using animal products. Many times, animals are not treated humanely, and we wanted to not support those businesses. We also thought that by making your own ice cream, it wouldn't cost as much as buying ice cream from a store. We estimated that the price for the ingredients was about $5-10. If we made our own ice cream, we would not be spending money on store bought ice cream in wasteful plastic.

We started off thinking we wanted to make vegan and non vegan ice cream. The ice creams would be flavored vanilla and strawberry. Sadie brought the ingredients which included heavy cream, coconut milk, and sprinkles. Black Pine Circle had sugar, vanilla extract, and mason jars. When we were trying to make the vegan ice cream, we made a mistake by only using the coconut cream and not the coconut milk. This caused it to freeze in an iceball. On the other hand, the heavy cream in the normal ice cream worked very well. We decided to make another vegan ice cream with the coconut cream and the coconut milk, but it was not thick enough. We forgot all about the strawberry ice cream, so we decided to make only vanilla. We found chocolate syrup in the fridge and decided to put chocolate in the ice cream. We tried to make vegan ice cream once more with soy milk, but it did not work out and wasn't as thick as the heavy cream ice cream, and tasted very bad. We made the ice cream by shaking all the ingredients together in a mason jar, and after five minutes, it was just like whipped cream. Then we put it in the freezer for three hours. After this, it was the consistency of normal ice cream.

I think that our project worked really well, but there are a few things that could have made it better. At first, we wanted to make vegan ice cream, but this did not work because we couldn't use heavy cream, which was a main ingredient. The alternatives did not work. An experiment I want to try in the future, is to get vegan whipped cream and put it in the freezer and see if it would turn out like the non vegan ice cream. Next time we want to make some ice cream that is vegan, maybe we should look up a good vegan recipe, instead on changing a non vegan recipe. The lesson that we learned is when you are making a new food, always make sure that you are following the recipe. Our advice for sixth graders doing this project is to make sure they have a solid plan, and do a test experiment before the final draft.




Link to recipe https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/recipes/a53547/mason-jar-ice-cream-recipe/

Climate Change Board Game: Terrafirma - Augie, Nate, and Eli

Maker Faire Blog Post about “Terrafirma"

By: Eli Mckoy Beiser, Augie Nice, and Nate Sommer

Our Maker Faire project was called Terrafirma. It was a board game where you would try to run a civilization. You had to make sure your civilians had food, water, and energy everyday. you had to build farms, water purifiers, and factories to provide those things. For everyday your civilians had these things, you got a point. Now for the hard part, getting these things for your civilians required you to put Co2 into your civilization’s atmosphere, we would add 10 Co2 to your atmosphere for every farm, water purifier, and factory you had per day. Once you added 400 Co2 to the atmosphere, your civilization would come to an end. So your goal as the player was to get as far as you could while keeping your civilians alive. The objective of our project was to make people more aware of how hard it is to provide people with their needs, while also balancing the trouble of climate change. Our project has very specific examples, and there are more problems you will encounter in running a civilization. One thing we thought was that people thought we should just get rid of fossil fuels, but those are how tons of people get energy. So our objective was not to tell people that fossil fuels are good and everyone should use them, but that thoughts saying to just get rid of fossil fuels should be given a better solution with more thought, we’re letting people know that solving climate change is a bit more complex than some people think. We were inspired to do this project because we have been talking about climate change a lot in school, whether it be a movie about it, or a science project about it, we talked about it a lot. This made us think more about that problem and we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to make people more aware. We only had two weeks to make this project so we had to work quickly while still making people aware of the complexity in climate change. In this time we think we still managed to make a fun game that still communicated the message we trying to get across.

The biggest challenge throughout the process of making this game was figuring out what our numbers would be, and how they would work. For example what number of Co2 would they have to have for their civilization to end. We overcame this by making a plan one day, making sure it worked, and then just changing things that didn’t work. For around 2 days we were testing numbers with people in the class to see what did not work for us. In fact, on the day of the faire we had to change a few numbers to make sure everything worked smoothly. In the end all our numbers worked fine, but it took awhile to find the numbers that worked.

So, Terrafirma was full of ups and downs. However, we learned a lot in the process: How to make the numbers work so that it was possible to play the game, how to adapt our original idea to fit constraints and problems that came up during our work process, and how to stick with a project even when it starts to look hopeless. But when we were done, we still felt like there was so much more that we could have done. For example, if we had more time, we would have made the game more pleasing to the eye, as we kind of had to rush the cutting and gluing of the buildings, they were made of cardboard which made it harder to look perfect. We also would have added more variables so there were more than one strategy to play. However, if you want to make a climate change board game, there are some things that we would suggest. First, plan everything! We thought that things would fall into place as we worked, but this was not the case. In addition, don’t rush the making of the game itself. It is very important that it looks polished so that people want to come and play your game. Lastly, play test as much as possible. The more you play test, the more likely it is that you will catch errors and make the game more fun to play and less hard to run.

In our project we used all school resources: paint and markers from the art room, cardboard and cardboard scissors from the maker room, hot glue from the science room, wood from Ms. Hills farm. So we spent no extra money on our project.

Sources:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rise-to-24-million-pounds-per-second/